Revcontent Ad Network Review for Publishers

Revcontent is one of the most popular ad networks among publishers. It is a content recommendation ad platform, just like Taboola and Outbrain. Today, I am going to share my own experience after serving their ads for around 45 days.

How did I start Serving Revcontent Ads?

I received an email from Revcontent asking if I am interested in serving Revcontent Ads. This is what they exactly quoted in the email;

We would be interested in running a 1 week test at $1.50 vCPM floor, however we would be open to testing at higher rates based on the quality of your traffic.

I agreed to display their ads on my blog for $1.50 vCPM (Viewable Cost Per Mile). So if the visitors don’t scroll and see their ad, the impression will not be counted. I was happy with this, and they really paid the amount what we agreed. However, the fill rate was not very good (around 50 percent). I liked the Advertisement quality because they didn’t display worst or spam ads like MGID or many other native Ad networks.

Why did I remove Revcontent Ads If It was really a good network?

After a month, the fill rate dropped like anything. The fill rate was around 15 percent that is the worst in the ad industry. I contacted them regarding the fill rate issue, they replied that they are working on it, and it will be improved soon. After a couple of days, the fill rate remained the same, but the CPM rate reduced to $0.51. The very next day, it dropped to $0.23, and the next day it dropped to $0.10.

I contacted Revcontent and asked the reason for this worst Fill rate and CPM rate. They replied;

We have an option to switch your account to a feature we are testing out -which is dynamic CPM-where performance is largely based on engagement of CTR. The first handful of publishers that are testing it are seeing improved CPM rates. We are migrating all of our publishers to Dynamic CPM versus fixed CPMs at the moment including your site.

Well, the improved CPM rate what they quoted sounds very funny. If improving CPM rate means dropping it from $1.50 to $0.10, what possibly could decrease mean? The worst CPM rate with the worst fill rate!

The first thing they should have done is to inform Publishers that they couldn’t provide the same CPM rate or fixed rate anymore. Decreasing Revenue and moving publishers from Fixed to Dynamic CPM without any communication, is not a good sign of any business.

Finally, I removed their ad tags.

I am not sure how it perform on other niches, but I am damn sure that Revcontent is not the best native ad platform for Tech Bloggers. Now I am running Native Ads within Google Adsense’s Matched Content unit, and it works perfectly fine. It increased the revenue as well as users’ engagement on my blog.